Teradata is announcing its new high-end systems, the Teradata 6700 series. Notes on that include:

Teradata tends to get 35-55% (roughly speaking) annual performance improvements, as measured by its internal blended measure Tperf. A big part of this is exploiting new-generation Intel processors.

This year the figure is around 40%.

The 6700 is based on Intel’s Sandy Bridge.

Teradata previously told me that Ivy Bridge — the next one after Sandy Bridge — could offer a performance “discontinuity”. So, while this is just a guess, I expect that next year’s Teradata performance improvement will beat this year’s.

Teradata has now largely switched over to InfiniBand.

Teradata is also talking about data integration and best-of-breed systems, with buzzwords such as:

A separate cabinet for special-purpose “Teradata Managed Servers”. While there’s some space for Managed Servers in other Teradata appliances, Teradata now offers so many such capabilities that it thinks you will likely need a separate rack for those as well. These include (partial list):

Comments

On the Teradata-software appliance alternatives, yes, the Teradata Extreme Performance Appliance (the all-SSD platform) is missing from the platform family portrait. That’s on purpose since Teradata is de-emphasizing this product given there are alternatives that meet a wider range of market needs. Specifically, the Active EDW 6700 (that was just announced) with the hybrid storage capability provides extreme levels of performance for the “hot”, frequently used data automatically placed in SSD while also providing standard levels of performance on “warm and cold” data placed in HDD. We have found that while the market has needs for extreme performance focused on a small amount of data it also demands that at the same time they need to analyze larger amounts of, say, short history data. So, the Active EDW fits the market needs better. The Extreme Performance Appliance was the pioneer in the use of SSD for data warehouse needs, but our understanding of this very high performance space has matured.

On the SAS-specific modeling appliance mention, this is the SAS High-Performance Analytics Server (HPAS) for Teradata. It is a complete, “all in one” appliance with the Teradata database for the SAS HPAS software. The TD Model 700 Appliance offers the high performance data management capabilities of the Teradata database. SAS HPAS software also leverages Teradata’s architecture to distribute analytic processing across all of the servers in the system. This combines the strengths of SAS and Teradata by leveraging the SAS advanced analytics capabilities including model development and deployment with the Teradata platform.

Too lengthy already, so more in the next post on points around Managed Servers, Unity and Unified Data Architecture